

“Shutting everything down” would do untold harm to many low income people.
I’m John Harris (they/them). I maintain the gaming blog Set Side B. I used to write @Play for GameSetWatch long ago. I’m Metafilter member JHarris. I wrote the books Exploring Roguelike Games for CRC Press, and We Love Mystery Dungeon for Limited Run Press. I’m on itch.io and there I maintain Loadstar Compleat, the archives of classic Commodore 64 disk magazine Loadstar. BLM! Trans rights are human rights!


“Shutting everything down” would do untold harm to many low income people.


Thank you!


Don’t I feel like a fool for trying to give you the benefit of the doubt.


“Ever heard of skills,” wow thanks for beginning with a dismissive statement that implies all of this you’re saying is not only true but obvious. This is not the way to respond to people with strong objections.


Your response is really unimpressive. My point is that LLM training, as it now stands, doesn’t seem like it can possibly adapt to an internet that isn’t full of free information ripe for the taking. If people come to rely on LLMs, how will they get the information to keep up with further advancements in, well, anything?


Assuming that’s true, and that’s a BIG assumption… What makes you think that would matter? AI has no interiority; it isn’t a thinking blob, it’s a text generator. Think of it as a fancy Markov chain.
Even if it were true, where in the chain do new principles, new techniques, new concepts enter into it? All these forms of generative AI can do is regurgitate what’s been fed into it. The worst thing you can train an AI from is AI-generated output.


Yes, the age of all programming is over, because no new libraries or languages will ever be invented and LLMs will this always know everything there is to know about coding based on what’s already been written which will never go obsolete.
Honestly, mocking these things is SO EASY.


But, that’s not alternate history, it’s speculative fiction.


If you can’t log into Windows you can’t change its OneDrive settings! What’s more, the user had no idea what was causing the problem, be it OneDrive or something else, until he did that troubleshooting! And, just setting up a new phone shouldn’t make your computer unbootable for any reason! Geez, way to victim-blame there.


I dunno? It sounds very plausible, exactly the kind of thing that Windows would do. I posted about it to Metafilter some time back and no one there seemed to think it couldn’t happen.


“Modi […] being ranked as one of the world’s most popular democratic leaders in the media” You (and everyone) should check out the Behind the Bastards episode on Modi, he is NOT a good person.


There was a story going around back in September ago about the person whose wife used OneDrive on her phone. It had taken upon itself to copy 25+GB of data on the phone into OneDrive, despite only having the free account tier, and copying it to their Windows 11 PC. There it completely filled up its small SSD boot drive, putting it into a condition of extremely low disk space, which in made it impossible for Windows to boot. Here it is.


It wouldn’t be difficult to make Lenovo laptops more repairable. I’ve had two, and both required taking the whole thing apart to replace the keyboard, the part most likely to have problems. I hate that about them.


Mobile devices tend to be much less versatile than PCs, mind you, and on purpose, due to one of Steve Jobs’ most misguided apprehensions, that it’d be a good idea to hide the filesystem from the user. (Cue someone somehow claiming that’s Good Actually in three, two, one…)


Yes, although it will be a full ANDROID PC.


Took a bit but found it, it’s not ChatGPT but a small self-hosted AI with an open source model: https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/


Trying to track it down…


He was sick and had a weak moment. He didn’t realize that it would just make the quote up.


Key is, used to be. Ars Technica is one of the best such magazines out there, but even their margins have to be razor thin. To stay at the top of Google search results you have to update super frequently. (Source: this Metafilter post: https://www.metafilter.com/212411/Ars-Technica-Pulls-AI-Article-With-AI-Fabricated-Quotes#8819559)
To put it into perspective, that’s around 2.3% of the whole US population.